Matthew Mosk in the Washington Post says that Thompson poses the most danger to McCain. Possibly, but my guess is that Thompson's entry is pulling down the poll numbers for everyone. If Thompson is now really in second by only six percent, all the publicity surrounding his official entrance will put him into first place.

Guest workers v. Illegals on worker wages

Here is the puzzle. Democrats say that they are against a guest worker program because it will lower the wages of American workers. OK, fine, that is indeed the effect of letting in more workers. The puzzle is that the Democrats don't have any problem passing other laws that encourage more illegal immigration which would also reduce the wages of those same workers. To put it differently, making it harder for illegals to stay would also increase wages. It is interesting that the arguments regarding wages are only raised for guest workers and not the rest of the issues in the debate.

Funny letter in the LA Times

I recently came across this amusing letter that was published in the LA Times. While it was published a few years ago, I still think that the letter is worth pointing to.

Los Angeles Times

July 16, 2004 Friday Home Edition

SECTION: CALIFORNIA; Metro; Editorial Pages Desk; Part B; Pg. 10

LENGTH: 199 words

HEADLINE: Ban on Assault Guns Misses the Target

BODY:

If you must resort to such hyperbole as dubbing common, semiautomatic firearms "weapons of mass destruction," then the least you could do is run that editorial on a different day from the one that claims Saddam Hussein didn't haveany.

How to get your jail sentence reduced by almost 90 percent: Cry

This is almost too funny. Paris Hilton was supposed to serve something like 23 days in jail (the sentence was 45 days, but with good behavior she was expected to get out in 23 days). Hilton still must serve home detention and it will be for the full 45 days.

I could write a defense of this for Ms. Hilton given that a day in jail for her must represent much more of a penalty in terms of forgone income than a day for most others, but I will not press the point in this case.

The tiny rate that people are wrongfully convicted

There is an interesting discussion of compensation to criminals who have been wrongfully incarcerated here. There are multiple interesting points in this discussion, but one of the more interesting is that there have apparently been only 200 cases exonerated through DNA evidence. Given that there are about 2.19 million people in prison just today and that we are talking about cases over many years, this seems to me like an amazingly small number. Off the top of my head I don't how many of these people were in prison for murder or other serious crimes such as rape or robbery, but suppose that in any given year that it is conservatively 400,000. A rate of 20 per year or even 40 per year or even a total of 200 being exonerated seems remarkably tiny. Even the worst possible and obviously wrong number would imply that only .05 percent were wrongfully convicted. The normal saying is that it is better to let 10 guilty men go than wrongfully convict one. Well, in this case the DNA evidence alone shows you would rather let 2000 guilty go rather than wrongfully convict one. I have lots of problems with overly aggressive prosecutors and would have thought that alone would imply that many more cases would be overturned via DNA evidence, but this evidence on exonerations through DNA evidence, despite the publicity that it receives, is pretty meager.

6/03/2007

At least this will keep the police busy

More on Parker Case

David Hardy gives his legal insights on the DC Parker gun control case here.

David makes many good legal points in the interview, though I do disagree with him on the costs of losing the case at the Supreme Court. I do think that it would have a devastating effect on those who support the right to protection to have the Supreme Court say that the 2nd Amendment does not protect an individual right. Right now the vast majority of people believe that there is an individual right to gun ownership and I think that would change with such a ruling. My guess is that there is a somewhat better than a 50 percent chance that won't happen, but if it did, it would be a big cost.